For the second consecutive morning, more than 50 Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) students, faculty, and supporters gathered outside their Pearl District building to protest for an hour against what they say is the school’s unfair treatment of its adjunct faculty, among a host of other issues.
“We’ll be out here every day” until demands are met, said adjunct PNCA instructor Tabitha Nikolai, who’s among the folks leading the charge to have the art school reinstate “numerous laid off and underemployed part time faculty.”
People at the demonstration expressed frustration that adjuncts are only on 16-week contracts with the school, not knowing until late if they’ll be back for the next semester. Tensions heightened recently when a course list for next fall was released with a number of adjuncts missing from it, listing “TBA” instead of their names. It appears a bunch of popular instructors have lost their classes, demonstrators said.
“I’ve been teaching here for five years and I feel like the adjunct model needs to be shifted,” explained one professor, who asked not to be identified by name. “There should be a different sort of adjunct relationship with a contract that allows for a longer period of time, if someone chose to opt-in to that sort of thing. That’s my main issue—going semester-to-semester not knowing whether or not you’re going to have a job, whether you have one class or two classes. They’re very generous and I love this institution, and this is a way to be heard that this is important and needs to probably change.”
“It’s a matter of keeping the ideals alive,” explained Anne Marie Oliver, who is co-chair of the school’s “MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research” program, about why she was out there supporting the effort. “And also, it’s about assumptions. Assumptions like seniority. Some people have been here for 10, 20 years, some maybe even more. Those people are not dispensable, they actually have to be honored and respected. The longtime assumption in the academy of seniority must be honored. So we simply want to bring this to people’s attention as an important issue, a critical issue. This demonstration for me is not against PNCA, it’s trying to remind people of what we’re about, what is our joint goal, objectives, what is our common mission.”
Oliver gave me more of her thoughts about the effort for better treatment of adjunct faculty, and I’ll just include them here verbatim:
I think higher education around the country is in great danger and that teaching has somehow lost its mission and allowed this to happen. And schools without teachers are nothing. They are not disposable items, they are absolutely essential for the enterprise to continue. PNCA is a very important cultural institution in the city, it is one of the major cultural institutions. The opposite of culture isn’t non-culture, it’s impoverishment, it’s life without meaning, life without beauty, life without joy. It’s imperative that we—faculty members, students, staff members, administrators—come together and rethink the mission of education. Because the mission of education has to do with something else. Everything that a generation deems indispensable for its life to continue on, this is what education is about. It’s about transmitting these values without which life has no meaning to younger generations. This is what must be respected.
Towards that end, faculty members here at PNCA, many of us refuse to take the positions of other faculty members, and anything that creates separation and space between faculty members in this kind of way is bound to fail. It may succeed temporarily, but it will never succeed in stamping out the spirit of those that have devoted their whole lives to education, to the arts, to this very fragile thing we call culture
And so today, the second of who-knows-how-many days, people gathered on and front of the school’s steps to make their voices heard. Groups of PNCA students held signs declaring “NO CONFIDENCE,” “PROTECT FACULTY,” “STUDENTS STAND W/ FACULTY,” “PEOPLE OVER PROFIT,” and “PLEASE NO CORPORATE ASSHOLES” (in contrast to the slightly gentler “PEOPLE NEED COMPASSIONATE ADMINISTRATORS” signs a few others brought).
They heard impassioned speeches (“My name is Julie Perini and I used to work at this intellectual sweatshop called ‘PNCA’…”) and poetry (a very pro-labor piece written and performed by professor Michael Reinsch) and more via megaphone. They marched around the building and chanted together (“When good jobs are under attack, what do we do? Fight back!”). They will be back tomorrow from 9-10 a.m.
For more coverage, read the Portland Tribune’s piece from yesterday, and check out a Tumblr page created by the folks leading the protest.
Here are some pictures from this morning:
